Update: Don't Shoot the Cat

So what happened with Monday's vote in Wisconsin?

The Don't Shoot The Cat site has the details:

The total vote was 6,830 in favor of Q62 and 5,102 opposed. It was close, but the "Pro-62" crowd took the vote by a 14-point margin. With 5.4 million people in the state, roughly 0.2% of the state turned out to vote. We actually had more people sign our anti-62 petition (over 21,000 so far) than the total number of people that showed up to vote at the county hearings.

(Here's the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources' official statement.)

So, will it become open season on cats in Wisconsin? Apparently not... the Governor, a man who, you can bet, doesn't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, has just weighed in:

A proposal to legalize the killing of feral cats is not going to succeed, Gov. Jim Doyle said Wednesday.

"I don't think Wisconsin should become known as a state where we shoot cats," said Doyle, a Democrat who neither hunts nor owns a cat. "What it does is sort of hold us up as a state that everybody is kind of laughing at right now."

He told reporters his office had received calls from around the country denouncing a proposal adopted Monday at meetings of the Wisconsin Conservation Congress, a public advisory group, that would classify wild, free-roaming cats as an unprotected species that kills song birds and other wildlife.

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Doyle said he respects the Conservation Congress but "on this one I think everybody recognizes it's not going anywhere."

If you signed a petition, made a phone call, wrote a letter to the editor... thanks.